Company Denies Fault In Election

February 17, 2001|By MAYA BELL Miami Bureau

MIAMI — An executive whose company compiled a mistake-riddled list meant to ferret out felons and other ineligible voters said Friday the company wasn't responsible for errors that kept eligible voters from casting ballots.

George Bruder, a vice president of ChoicePoint Inc., told the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights that his company was "simply a data processor" following state orders when it developed an intentionally over-inclusive list of registered voters who might be convicted felons, registered in more than one county or even dead.

It was up to the state's 67 supervisors of elections, Bruder said, to verify whether any of those names were actual matches with voters on their rolls or "false positives." It was also up to the supervisors, Bruder said, to purge those matches from their rolls. The company never erased a single name.

"There were no inaccuracies," Bruder said. "What we did was per the specifications of the Division of Elections ... The state has indicated to us that we did an excellent job."

Commissioners, investigating alleged voter irregularities during Florida's 2000 presidential election, were not impressed. Some wondered aloud how ChoicePoint, formerly DataBase Technologies, earned $4 million for a list that was never intended to be reliable.

"I find that breathtaking," Commission Chairwoman Mary Frances Berry said. "If you could get $4 million to do that much work in that time period, it's truly amazing."

Intended to scrub the state's voter rolls of ineligible voters, the list was used to purge hundreds of law-abiding voters from the voter rolls. The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People alleges that the mistakes disproportionately affected blacks, keeping scores of them from voting. It names ChoicePoint in a civil rights lawsuit against Secretary of State Katherine Harris.

Former Broward County Elections Supervisor Jane Carroll and Palm Beach Elections Supervisor Theresa LePore said they never used the list because of its inaccuracies.

Miami-Dade Supervisor David Leahy said he felt compelled to use the list but was dismayed by its shortcomings. Of the first 5,762 local voters on the first list his office received, Leahy said, 327 were not felons and 485 had had their civil rights restored.

"It was the only list available, so that's why we used it," he said.

Wrapping up what may be its final Florida session, the commission spent much of its second hearing listening to a litany of familiar Election Day woes: early-closing polls, inaccessible precincts, uncooperative or ill-trained poll workers, overburdened phone lines, confusing ballots, language barriers and voting equipment failures.

The bipartisan commission is trying to determine whether anyone was denied the right to vote because of their race, ethnicity, age or creed. The panel will publish its report in March.